SATA Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jamie
  • Start date Start date
J

Jamie

I was thinking of switching to SATA however I was wondering if it is
possible to still keep my PATA drives for storage and what not or would it
cause conflictions or would it not work at all. Or the best possible case
scenerio all would be fine. Thanks in advance.
 
You can mix SATA and PATA drives. You should be able to select which drive to boot from in the BIOS, although some have reported problems doing this.
 
Jamie said:
I was thinking of switching to SATA however I was wondering
if it is possible to still keep my PATA drives for storage and
what not or would it cause conflictions or would it not work at
all.
Click to expand...


There will be no conflicts (nor conflictions, for that matter)
if you have controllers for both SATA and PATA drives.
If you don't have a controller for one of them on your
motherboard, you can use an add-on PCI card with the
requisite controller on it. Take a look at SIIG's offerings
for SATA:
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=103&pid=467 ,
for PATA:
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=103&pid=437

*TimDaniels*
 
I was thinking of switching to SATA however I was wondering if it is
possible to still keep my PATA drives for storage and what not or would it
cause conflictions or would it not work at all. Or the best possible case
scenerio all would be fine. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
If you have a SATA only Motherboard, you can easily get a $10
SATA/PATA bridge to make your PATA drives work in a SATA system. Do a
search on e-bay for examples of what I'm talking about.
 
I was thinking of switching to SATA however I was wondering if it is
possible to still keep my PATA drives for storage and what not or would it
cause conflictions or would it not work at all.
Click to expand...

That will work fine, there is no conflict in merely using
both types of drives. The main issue is that if you're
transferring your windows installation, you'll need to have
it recognize this new drive as the OS source. The easy way
to do that is clone the old OS drive to the new, power
off/on the system with only the new drive for one boot
cycle, then reattach the old drive. Of course you'd also
reconfig the board bios to boot from the SATA before the
PATA and/or wipe the old PATA drive so the box doesn't then
start booting from the PATA drive again.
 
IF your motherboard has provisions for both SATA and PATA harddrives then
you should have no problems mixing them.
 
If you have a SATA only Motherboard, you can easily get a $10
SATA/PATA bridge to make your PATA drives work in a SATA system. Do a
search on e-bay for examples of what I'm talking about.
Click to expand...

Recently, I read a magazine test of 5 bridges.
None (!!) of them performed flawless, only 1 proved to be more or
less usable.

Also: Take into account what it would cost (per gigabyte) to just
replace your PATA storage with new SATA.
New drives, new warranty periodes, seamless performance (no
PCI-bus bottleneck).
 
Recently, I read a magazine test of 5 bridges.
None (!!) of them performed flawless, only 1 proved to be more or
less usable.

Also: Take into account what it would cost (per gigabyte) to just
replace your PATA storage with new SATA.
New drives, new warranty periodes, seamless performance (no
PCI-bus bottleneck).
Click to expand...

No modern chipsets put the PATA controller on the PCI bus.
SATA is an evolutionary improvement that so far, offers very
little performance benefit because the drives use the same
technology beyond the bridge interface.
 
No modern chipsets put the PATA controller on the PCI bus.
Click to expand...

True. But you cut the part of a 'SATA only motherboard'.

In order to connect legacy PATA drives to such a beast would
require either a bridge-board (which seems to be unreliable) or
an interface card. Which in turn would connect to the PCI in most
cases. (I haven't seen any PCIx to EIDA / PATA yet :-)

I must also add a correction to my earlier statement. The
magazine (dutch edition of C'T, september issue) tested 4
different bridge boards, not 5.
 
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